New Jan. 6 footage appears to show rioter firing a gun in the air during Capitol attack
NBC Universal
RYAN J. REILLY
February 10, 2024 at 10:31 AM
WASHINGTON — Newly unearthed footage from Jan. 6, 2021, appears to show a rioter — a man identified in an NBC News story nearly two years ago — firing a gun into the air outside the Capitol during the attack.
Online sleuths who have aided in hundreds of Jan. 6 prosecutions say he is the same man they identified to the FBI who is currently individual No. 200 on the bureau’s Capitol Violence page, which he first appeared on three years ago. Videos and photographs from the Capitol on Jan. 6 showed him with what appears to be a gun in his waistband. As NBC News previously reported, that man, John Emanuel Banuelos, told Salt Lake City police that he was at the Capitol and had been captured on film with a gun. “I was in the D.C. riots,” he told the investigators, according to a police transcript. “I’m the one in the video with the gun right here.”
Banuelos has not been arrested or charged in connection with Jan. 6; the Salt Lake City police had arrested him in connection with the fatal stabbing of 19-year-old Christopher Thomas Senn in a park on July 4, 2021.
“Man, should I just tell the FBI to come get me or what?” he asked Salt Lake City police officers, according to a police transcript. Weeks later, Banuelos called an investigator with the department and “talked about going where Donald Trump sent him,” apparently referencing the Capitol, according to a police record. The Salt Lake City DA’s office did not pursue a case against Banuelos, who claimed self-defense in Senn’s death.
Now, footage released by another Jan. 6 rioter appears to show Banuelos firing the gun into the air twice during the chaotic scene on the west side of the Capitol, as rioters battled with police. Online sleuths also surfaced U.S. Capitol Police surveillance footage previously released in connection with another Capitol attack case that shows the man they’ve identified as Banuelos appearing to fire the gun. They found multiple other videos in which the gunshots can be heard.
The footage is the first showing a rioter firing a gun on Jan. 6. The incident took place at 2:34 p.m., which is about 10 minutes before an officer inside the Capitol shot and killed Ashli Babbitt as she jumped through a broken window leading into the Speaker’s Lobby. The incident with the gun outside the Capitol was not previously known to online sleuths and has never been mentioned in any court filing. At the time and location where the shots appear to have been fired, the Capitol grounds were in chaos, with law enforcement firing their own nonlethal rounds of crowd-control munitions following sustained, repeated assaults on officers, which could explain why the sound of two gunshots didn’t grab much attention.
Despite repeated false claims from conservative media figures that the mob that stormed the Capitol was unarmed, a multitude of defendants were armed with deadly or dangerous weapons, including several who carried firearms, as the Justice Department has proven in court. Among Jan. 6 rioters who were proven to have carried firearms during the Capitol attack are Christopher Alberts, who was sentenced to seven years in prison; Mark Mazza, who carried two guns and was sentenced to five years in federal prison; and Guy Reffitt, who was sentenced to seven years in federal prison after he became the first Jan. 6 defendant to go to trial.
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